Publications by Faculty & Alumni

This dissertation examines the reception of European law in Egypt, the origins of Egyptian movements to revive Islamic law, and foundations of transformations in Egyptian-Islamic legal thought between 1875 and 1960. The dissertation has two principal arguments. First, it maintains that an understanding of present-day Islamic law, both theoretical and applied, requires an understanding of developments that occurred in Egyptian legal thought and education between 1875 and 1960. Second, the dissertation demonstrates how the reception of European law in Egypt impacted the country's intellectual culture, its legal-educational institutions, the alignment patterns of its law scholars, and Islamic legal thought between 1875 and 1960. Although the influence of European law and legal thought only partially explains the transformations that took place in Islamic law and legal thought in Egypt, the dissertation argues nonetheless that European influence laid foundations for certain transformations that occurred. Section 1 narrates the evolution of the popular Egyptian desire to revive Islamic law in the face of European legal reception. Section 2 argues that scholars in Europe created fields of knowledge that influenced Egyptian scholars' approaches to secular and Islamic law. Section 3 narrates the intellectual and curricular history of Egypt's law faculties. The section focuses on the Cairo University Law Faculty. Section 4 examines a transformational treatise in Islamic obligations and contract doctrine, Chafik Chehata's Essai d'une théorie générale de l'obligation en droit musulman (1936). The treatise is analyzed as an example of how European ideas inspired the formation of "general theory" writing in Egyptian-Islamic legal thought.

This dissertation seeks to reinsert the port city of Aden into the postwar world of the rising Cold War, escalating decolonization, and growing global interconnectivity. As the world's second largest port during the 1950s, Aden is a significant venue for historical research and an under-appreciated link of the imperial and “Western” chain of port cities that circled the globe after the Second World War. Rather than retreating from “East of Suez” the British Empire re-imagined their control of Aden as a modern Cold War project inline with both enlightened imperialism and Free World interests. The city's decolonization is therefore a paradigmatic case of British postwar efforts to retain some of their more valuable and functional colonies in a bipolar world system. Aden's rise and fall also provides insight into novel forms of anti-imperial resistance that surfaced between the onset of Aden's formal colonization in 1937 and the rapid expansion of the city's postwar economy, best symbolized by the opening of the Little Aden Oil Refinery in 1954. During this time span organized labor would play the central part in resisting Aden's uncontrolled expansion as well as the determined British attempt to surgically remove Aden from the Arab political space and transform it instead into a global port city. The imperial administration attempted to do so by enhancing the city's cosmopolitan ethnic makeup and recasting Aden as an important node of the burgeoning Anglo-American alliance. Though both efforts were successful to a certain degree, the imperial administration simultaneously neglected several longstanding socioeconomic issues that plagued Aden's economy: namely, immigration, housing and cost of living. These problems gradually leached into the political debates concerning Aden's future and gradually drove Aden's labor movement and anti-imperial body politic towards extremism and rejectionism. Labor-Empire actions and reactions fulminated in a pivotal turning point of its postwar development in 1960. This moment—the removal of the right to strike—neatly illustrates how later anti-imperial movements engaged with different dialogues, networks and international spaces in order to outflank their imperial opponents and force them to adopt new and unprecedented strategies to counter and neutralize these new threats.

This dissertation investigates the Greek War of Independence as an Ottoman experience, exploring in particular how Sultan Mahmūd II (1808-1839) and the central state elite tried to make sense of and reacted to the rapidly changing world around them. It explores how the perceptions, actions and reactions of the Ottoman state to the Greek insurgency had a deep and long-lasting impact on both Ottoman state and society, and how it necessitated a radical rethinking of the empire. Specifically, it looks into the war's ensuing need to create a self-mobilizing proto-citizen, a project that was articulated by the Ottoman state as a response to the threat posed by the Greek insurgents. This study thus suggests that nineteenth century Ottoman history, especially the history of Tanzimat, cannot be properly understood without connecting it to the Greek War of Independence —something that has been sorely lacking in most “classical” histories of the Tanzimat period.

Nations tell stories about themselves that tend to cohere around a shared language and a history unique to a particular land. South and West Asia—regions that shared Persian as a language of social, cultural and political power and prestige for centuries, until the early 19th century—present a conundrum in the context of nationalist narratives and the uniqueness these narratives claim for themselves. Literary and historical scholarship on the Persianate world largely reflects the assumptions underpinning these narratives, and, as a result, the scope and analyses of this scholarship are structured by the logic of protonationalist sensibilities. This dissertation seeks to contribute to a growing body of work on Persianate culture, considering how a shared language of learning and power, which was enabled by and reinforced the circulation of ideas, goods, texts, people and practices, was vital in the constitution of cultural ideas and social systems in the neighboring lands of Iran and India. Texts that scholars have generally read as iconically protonationalist are reconsidered alongside contemporaneous texts from a variety of genres that share features as commemorative texts of self and community. This dissertation argues that a shared Persianate culture, vested in a corpus of learning and expressed in an ethics of comportment (adab), was the basis of conceptions of self and community in the turbulent century that caused populations to disperse, centers of power to shift and the circulations that interlinked Persianate regions to ebb and flow. Beginning with the two assumed bases of protonationalist and nationalist community, land as society and language as culture, this dissertation begins the work of making sense of early modern Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.

As a student of history, when one studies either Middle Eastern history or diplomatic/international history after the WWII, it is almost impossible to avoid coming across terms such as the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Suez crisis of 1956, the Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism, Nehru and Nasser, for instance. Student often learn how the Bandung Conference marked the watershed in the history of the so-called Third World countries. How those countries attempted to balance themselves between the two super powers representing completely different political ideologies in the Cold War. Then the Suez crisis of 1956 and how Nasser came out of the crisis as a hero in a war many people saw as an attempt of the British and the French, with the help of the Israelis, to resurrect the imperialism in Egypt.

One often learns about those historical moments. Yet the relations between Egypt and India, which were important players in the international arena, are not well studied and did not receive high priority. Many literatures in the field of foreign relations, foreign policies and foreign affairs of Egypt and India are overwhelmingly about Egypt or India with the U.S. Europe or with their neighbors, or in the region in which the two countries are located. One wonders what had happened to the cordial relationships between Egypt and India after the Bandung conference and Suez crisis when their relations reached its zenith. How did the two countries develop and nurture their relations is not well researched.

My thesis revolves around a number of core historical questions. What had become of the once strong and vigorous relations between Egypt and India? What triggered the wane in cordial relations between Egypt and India since 1956? By looking how the two countries reacted and reciprocated each other in a number of political crises, such as the Kashmir issue, the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 and the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, one can see the roots of the discord which led to the decline of their relations in 1960s. On the other hand, what were the cultural exchanges between the two countries and what were the results of such exchanges? How cultural activities across borders are vital to the fostering and strengthening of relations among nations.

An ethnographic account of Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt, Cultivating Mystery argues that an anthropological study of miracles can help to explain the social world of a religious minority that perceives itself as beleaguered in the midst of a Muslim nation. Miracle accounts are one way by which a religious community constructs itself along moral lines and maintains, contests, and negotiates the social boundaries between self and other. An emphasis on materiality is intended to make a critical intervention in ongoing debates about belief by illuminating how religiously charged objects and language are constitutive of the relationship between inter-religious politics and faith as embodied practice.

The dynamic of miracles and materiality is further complicated by the mystery that emerges and is cultivated in this intersection. I employ the concept of mystery as an umbrella term for encounters with things not seen, or seen but not quite understood, encounters that seem always to elude capture in semiotic form, and yet can only be captured in semiotic form. A revelation is made in material form, yet the revelation itself conceals something from the religious practitioner. Gestures toward a largely invisible world, made by signs of the miraculous, are used to create relationships between heavenly beings and those on earth. These relationships, in turn, are taken by pious Copts as reflecting their moral superiority in the context of Muslim Egypt.

After introducing the concepts of mystery, materiality, and miracles in Chapter One, Part I of the dissertation examines the historical background that frames the current investment in the miraculous that one today finds among Copts. Chapter Two discusses the figure of Baba (Pope) Kyrillos VI (pope 1959-1971) who is widely considered a saintly man by contemporary Copts, and the current Coptic Pope, Shenouda III (1971-present) with a particular emphasis on the changing Church-State relationship over the last four decades. Chapter Three offers an analysis of the 1968 apparition of the Virgin Mary in a neighborhood of Cairo highlighting how the current political atmosphere, especially in terms of Muslim-Christian tensions, is imposed on a retrospective view of the apparition.

Part II explores the materiality of difference and piety. Chapter Four examines the increasing Coptic mobility around Egypt to Coptic holy sites and the ways in which the places visited and the very materiality of these places shape a particular mode of moral being all the while discreetly cultivating, on the one hand, a sense of mystery in encounters with the relics of holiness (such as the bones of saints), and, on the other hand, a sense of difference from the Muslim Other. Chapter Five expands on the previous chapter by specifically looking at two Coptic interlocutors' encounters with saints and the Devil through material objects. Of particular concern are the signs that for some Copts are taken to be indications of their piety.

Part III consists of one chapter (Chapter Six), which is a theoretical reflection on the relationship between faith and skepticism wherein I argue that not only are these facets of religious practice two sides of the same coin, but that it is perhaps in the space between them, between one's simultaneous embrace of the tenets of her religion and the skepticism that creeps up behind her, where mystery resides. To invoke, with a twist, a popular Biblical passage, faith without skepticism is dead.